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ECE Alum Vishal Misra Selected as Distinguished Alumnus at the Institute of Indian Technology Bombay

ECE Alum Vishal Misra Selected as Distinguished Alumnus at the Institute of Indian Technology Bombay

Vishal Misra

UMass Amherst alumnus Vishal Misra (M.S.’96, Ph.D.’00, ECE), now a professor of computer science at Columbia University, has been named a Distinguished Alumnus at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Misra is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and was an Outstanding Junior Alumni Recipient from the UMass Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department in 2014. See Misra’s Columbia website »

“Every year IIT Bombay recognizes and celebrates the outstanding achievements of its alumni in their chosen field of endeavor,” as the announcement letter to Misra from IIT Bombay said. “The Selection Committee is very pleased to choose you for the 'Distinguished Alumnus Award' for the current year…IIT Bombay takes pride in your outstanding achievements in Academics / Research. The award will be presented on March 8, 2019, during the Institute Foundation Day Function.”

Dr. Misra is credited with inventing live-microblogging at Cricinfo, a company co-founded by him while he was a graduate student at UMass Amherst, thus predating Twitter by 10 years. Cricinfo was later acquired by ESPN and became the world’s most popular sports portal.

The AMC Fellow awards “computing professionals recognized for transformative contributions in areas including accessible voting, computer animation, machine learning, natural language processing, and software,” says the AMC website. According to the IEEE website, the “IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.”

Meanwhile, recipients of the College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Alumni Award are worthy ambassadors for the College of Engineering and have shown extraordinary effort and notable success in their early careers.

Misra has served as a visiting scientist at Google, an associate editor of the Journal of the ACM , and the chair of ACM SIGMETRICS special interest group on performance evaluation.

Among other achievements, Misra has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award; a Department of Energy Career Principal Investigator Award in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and High Performance Networks; and Google and IBM Faculty Awards. He has been issued eight U.S. Patents.

His research emphasis is on mathematical modeling of networking systems, bridging the gap between practice and analysis. Based on Dr. Misra’s doctoral and post-doctoral research at UMass Amherst, Cisco Systems Inc. developed a software algorithm, deployed on most cable modems, to better manage network latencies and overall network throughput.

Dr. Misra served as the vice-chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia University from 2009 to 2011, and in 2011 he spun out a company called Infinio in the area of datacenter storage. Misra received his B. Tech. from IIT Bombay in 1992 in addition to his UMass degrees. (March 2019)